2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
How does a thought retain its meaning while its content continually changes? In this essay, supplied in its 1970 republication, Alfred Schütz brings William James’s stream of thought into conversation with Husserl’s phenomenological psychology. His focus is the often-overlooked fringe of experience: the felt relations, expectations, and receding impressions that make a present thought more than an isolated mental event. Schütz shows how James’s descriptions can illuminate Husserl’s accounts of horizons and temporal continuity without making James a phenomenologist or claiming historical influence. The comparison gives readers a concrete approach to a difficult problem: how an object remains identifiable across changing experiences, and how the conclusion of a train of thought can remain available after its intermediate steps have faded.
What can economic analysis establish about monopoly, and where must political judgment begin? In this 1942 review of E. A. G. Robinson’s Monopoly, Fritz Machlup admires the handbook’s integration of institutional detail and theory while testing the precision of its claims. He questions the basis for comparing one person’s satisfaction with another’s burden and identifies the constant-marginal-cost assumption needed for Robinson’s claim about demand elasticity and monopoly output. His appreciation is equally discriminating: breaking a monopoly into a few firms need not restore competition, and opportunities for firms to combine complicate equilibrium. The review offers a compact example of sympathetic criticism, showing how accessible applied economics can remain answerable to explicit assumptions and clearly acknowledged value judgments.
When a household buys a car on monthly instalments, does that credit drive the business cycle or merely ride it? This National Bureau study, completed as Regulation W brought consumer credit under wartime control, argues firmly for the second view. Haberler defines instalment credit narrowly — scheduled repayment, finance charge, short maturity, a negotiable instrument — and shifts attention from the stock of debt outstanding to the flow of net credit change, the excess of new lending over repayments, which he takes as its direct contribution to effective demand. Durable-goods purchases, especially automobiles, make that flow cyclically volatile and, through the acceleration principle formalized in Samuelson's appendix, magnify swings in output. Yet credit follows income rather than leading it; between the oversaving arguments of Keynes and Hansen and the Austrian warnings of Hayek and Mises, Haberler places credit as amplifier, not motor.
The dog wags the tail and not the tail the dog.
Machinery and labour, Ricardo wrote, are in constant competition; from that maxim Hayek builds a tight reconstruction of the 'Ricardo effect,' the proposition that a general shift in wages relative to product prices alters the comparative profitability of methods combining labour and capital in different proportions. Writing in German in 1942, he makes turnover velocity—Umschlagsgeschwindigkeit—his gauge of capital intensity: a price rise adds the same margin at each sale, lifting the internal rate far more on fast-turnover, labour-heavy methods than on slow, machine-heavy ones. Firms redirect current outlay toward direct labour, even generating unemployment among machine-makers amid strong consumer demand. Testing the extreme of perfectly elastic credit and answering Kaldor and Wilson, Hayek insists that cheap money can obscure real scarcity but never abolish it.
Solange ungenützte Reserven von Arbeitern zu unveränderten Preisen zur Verfügung stehen, bedeuten unbegrenzte Geldmittel unbegrenzte Verfügungsmacht über die Produktionsmittel.
English translation: “So long as unused reserves of workers are available at unchanged prices, unlimited monetary means signify unlimited command over the means of production. But these are not the conditions relevant in a state of full employment, which will prevail near the peak of a boom.”
Rarely taken seriously in Germany and often dismissed for its ties to monetary crisis theory, the Wicksellian process — the claim that an interest rate departing from equilibrium sets off a cumulative movement in prices, investment, and the structure of production — receives here a searching capital-theoretic defense. Writing in 1942 for Kiel's Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv and taking Erik Lindahl's Studies as his occasion, Strigl runs the process through four models and reaches a single stubborn conclusion: new capital requires a restriction of consumption before, during, or after investment, even where productive capacity sits idle. He rejects the old quantity theory's view of money as a mere price multiplier, and faults Lindahl for treating the necessary saving as an automatic by-product of the process rather than its precondition.
Eine spezifische Selektionsfunktion des Kapitalzinses besteht nun in der Begrenzung der Produktionsumwege.
English translation: “A specific selective function of interest on capital consists in limiting the roundaboutness of production.”
Anton von Prokesch-Osten carried Vienna's cause first to Berlin and then to the Frankfurt Bundestag, where he faced the young Bismarck across a table neither man respected. Through these missions between 1849 and the Crimean War, Engel-Janosi reconstructs the struggle over whether Germany would become an enlarged Prussia or Prussia be sacrificed to a unified German nation. Schwarzenberg's design—that Vienna become the centre of a Habsburg-led Mitteleuropa—runs up against a Prussian Borussianism strong enough to thwart every Austrian plan while still too weak to build its own. In quarrels over the federal fleet, fortresses, and procedural privilege, a decade emerges when unification was not yet inevitable and Austria's federal alternative was still a living idea—one strategically defeated long before 1866.
Dank der überlegenen Taktik Bismarcks und der Furcht der kleineren Staaten triumphierte Preußen im Bundestag.
English translation: “Thanks to Bismarck's superior tactics and the fear of the smaller states, Prussia triumphed in the Federal Diet.”
Written in 1942 for Americans wary of economists whose earlier prosperity forecasts had failed, this plain-language essay defines inflation as an increase in money and money substitutes - deposit currency and bank credit - and traces where its losses fall. Mises shows that every creditor is silently robbed: savings, pensions, insurance claims, and Social Security benefits are all repaid in depreciated dollars, while salaried professionals watch living costs outrun their incomes. He weighs the usual escapes - gold, foreign currency, farmland, stocks - and finds each blocked by law or market. Gravest of all, he argues, are the moral and political effects: inflation destroys thrift, radicalizes the ruined, and breeds support for dictators and quack remedies. Its true cause is not necessity but the government's choice to finance itself by credit expansion rather than honest taxes.
For all these millions of people, every further step toward inflation means a further decline in the real value of the claims or credits they have saved up by years of toil and sacrifice.
When a peacetime economy converts to war, military demand piles onto civilian demand, usable productive means shrink, and the money circulation is thrown out of joint—three simultaneous shocks that no ordinary peacetime remedy can absorb. Written in Zurich in 1942 alongside Swiss reports by Böhler and Dütscher, this study refuses the comforting idea that policy should preserve the old circular flow; the whole national economy, Amonn argues, becomes structurally a war economy or it is none. He challenges the dogma that taxes never inflate while loans always do, subordinates the prevention of inflation to the overriding goal of maximum production, and defends rationing, differentiated price control, and savings-based war loans, testing each against Swiss figures for the cost of living, wages, and foreign trade.
Aber man geriete dann von der Scylla der Inflation unvermeidlich in die Charybdis der Deflation.
English translation: “But one would then inevitably pass from the Scylla of inflation into the Charybdis of deflation.”
Can an economy remain capitalist when private ownership survives but government dictates how enterprises operate? In this 1942 review of Maxine Y. Sweezy’s The Structure of the Nazi Economy, Ludwig von Mises praises her empirical research while contesting her classification of the system she describes. His criterion is effective control over production, not legal ownership or equality of incomes; on that basis, he calls the Nazi economy socialist. A particularly revealing tension concerns managers: deprived of independent authority, they may nevertheless preserve capital in the hope of recovering their businesses after the war. This brief review offers a concentrated encounter with Mises’s distinction between the outward forms of enterprise and the power to make economic decisions—and with his attempt to explain productive incentives within a system he condemns.
Listening to someone speak, we follow a thought as it unfolds; reflecting on our own experience, we grasp what has already occurred. This temporal contrast anchors Alfred Schütz’s alternative to Scheler’s account of how we understand others. In this essay, republished in 1967, Schütz accepts Scheler’s challenge to theories that infer another mind from bodily signs, but rejects the hypothesis of an originally undifferentiated consciousness. A shared present, he argues, can explain the priority of the “We” without dissolving distinct persons into a common stream of experience. The resulting account separates participation in another’s unfolding activity from certainty about what that person thinks. Readers can discover why ordinary conversation offers a precise philosophical problem: how we inhabit time together while remaining irreducibly different centres of experience.
Between a rise in commodity prices and money wages that lag behind it lies a mechanism Hayek retrieves from Ricardo and sets at the center of capital and cycle theory. When labor grows cheaper relative to selling prices, the methods that pay are not the long, roundabout, machine-intensive ones but the quick-turnover processes that recover and reinvest their outlays fast—so a boom in consumer demand can perversely reduce demand for capital goods as firms work old plant harder, postpone replacement, and shift toward circulating capital. Reworking the wage-price relation through rates of turnover and internal rates of return, Hayek argues against treating the interest rate as the sole determinant of technique, and shows how credit expansion, once incomes and prices rise, pulls resources back toward shorter processes and throws the capital-goods trades into unemployment.
Could knowledge of the trade cycle prevent entrepreneurs from helping to set one in motion? In this short response to L. M. Lachmann, Mises accepts that a credit-induced boom depends on how businesspeople interpret easier borrowing, while denying that Austrian theory had overlooked this condition. His distinctive emphasis is on calculation rather than mere optimism: interest rates can mislead investors even when they appear normal or high, if they inadequately reflect monetary depreciation. The exchange clarifies where expectations enter Mises’s monetary explanation—and why recognizing credit expansion is harder than observing abundant loans or rising demand. It also leaves open a pointed possibility: entrepreneurs who understand the mechanism might respond differently, changing the outcome the theory explains.